Joo Dee Has an AMAZING Name
So I was working on my “What’s in a Name” series for the Earth Kingdom, specifically researching Joo Dee’s name origin. I initially thought Joo Dee’s name was meant to be a joke, since it sounds like such a mundane English name (Judy). However, the more I looked into her name, the more depth of meaning I discovered. Allow me to share these discoveries with you:
The name Joo Dee literally mean “Local” (局地) in Mandarin Chinese. It’s a very fitting, if somewhat uninteresting name for a tour guide. However, when you break down the hanzi (Chinese characters) of her name, she becomes both an ominous and tragic figure of Ba Sing Se.
The characters used for her name mean Bureau (局) and Earth (地), respectively. So when writing her name, you literally read it as “Bureau of Earth”, which sounds like a label you’d slap on a piece of government property. Keep in mind, Joo Dee is not the name of one person, it’s an identity forced upon droves of brainwashed women. They’re not just figurative tools of the government, they are literal tools of the government and are never allowed to forget that through the name given to them.
The American Equivalent to this would be:
“Hello, my name is Cia and I’ll be your DC tour guide! ^_^”
“Oh, Sia, that’s a pretty name…”
“It’s spelled C-I-A, as in Central Intelligence Agency! ^_^”
“Wait, you work for the CIA?”
And then you find out she’s a victim of Project MKUltra.
And that is Ba Sing Se in a nutshell: systematic, callous, and casual dehumanization with a thin veneer of affability.
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